Saturday, 16 June 2012

So I finally got my hands on a Raspberry Pi last week, and apart from having no idea what to actually use it for, I'm quite impressed. Here are a few notes from me testing out Arch Linux on the Pi...

Firstly, it didn't like my old monitor through a HDMI to DVI adapter - it wouldn't display anything. I knew it was working as I could SSH into it. It turns out there's an issue with a config.txt that someone left on the image, which forced it to use the obsolete composite output. Delete the text file, works fine.

Next, I found it only saw 128MB of RAM. As I have no intention of putting X on it, I can live without half of my precious RAM being dedicated to the graphics. In /boot you need to copy arm224_start.elf in place of start.elf. This allows a 224/32 split.

Sound is enabled through adding snd-bcm2835 to rc.conf in the MODULES section. Install alsa-utils for good measure

It came with US and DE locales available. Adding GB to /etc/locale.gen and running locale-gen sorted that. Also need to change the two lines in rc.conf to match. Keymap is uk not gb - oops. Localepurge got me 58 valuable MB back on my SD card. Fixing the locales also fixed alsamixer and elinks' ascii borders not displaying right

Fbi (framebuffer image viewer) wouldn't run until I installed a font for it. I used one from ttf-liberation